Tag Archive for President’s Intelligence Checklist

In his news report, New CIA Information on JFK Assassination, on the release of thousands of presidential briefings from the 1960s, HuffPo reporter Keith Thomson devoted considerable effort to ridiculing unnamed JFK conspiracy theorists who attended a press briefing at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas last week.

Along the way, Thomson managed to miss the historical significance of the CIA’s disclosure. Read more

The briefings, released last week, showed how the Agency sought to get information to the two presidents.The CIA had long resisted releasing the records on the grounds that any disclosure would harm national security, an argument the Agency has now abandoned.

Share this:

Three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA told his successor Lyndon Johnson a bit of news: the agency’s sources had just confirmed press reports that accused assassin Lee Oswald had visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City two months before.

Here’s what the President’s Intelligence Checklist (TPIC)– just released by the CIA and LBJ Library–reported on November 25, 1963.

It was revealing moment. Intentionally or not, the CIA was misleading the new U.S. president about what Agency personnel knew of the man accused of killing his predecessor.

The CIA’s release of 2,500 presidential briefings written during the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations is shedding new light on the agency’s reaction to the assassination of JFK. The CIA has long contended that the briefings could not be released in any form for reasons of national security

On the day Kennedy was killed the CIA briefers wrote they could find “no more fitting words” than a poem that JFK sometimes cited about the burdens of his office: Read more